Golf, invented by the Scots and spread across North America by the WASP business
elite, has always emphasized self-restraint and a slightly stuffy brand of
courtesy. So, what was the traditionally stolid American Ryder Cup team doing
last Sunday rolling around on the 17th green of Brookline, Massachusetts'
blue-blooded The Country Club, gang-hugging like an NFL squad that's just
won the Super Bowl?

After Justin Leonard, in front of the most pumped-up crowd in golf history,
sank a miraculous putt to put the U.S. on the verge of defeating Europe,
his teammates charged across the green to congratulate him. They even may
have -- I'm aghast to report -- stepped on the putting line of Jose Maria
Olazabal, who, visibly rattled, then missed a 25-foot putt that could have
kept Europe alive.

While you may have found this spontaneous display of joy on the links charming,
the Old World reacted as if the Americans had bludgeoned Olazabal with their
sand wedges. Europe's assistant captain, Sam Torrance, sputtered, "It was
the most disgusting thing I have ever seen in my life." A spokesman for Tony
Blair, the British prime minister, complained, "Mr. Blair caught it on the
news and could not believe that all those golfers could run on to the green.
He did agree with Sam Torrance."

Are we witnessing the Decline and Fall of Golf? Of course not. Golf will
only become an even hotter entertainment commodity now that the U.S. stars
have finally begun showing us the passions they so long kept bottled up inside.
As one English columnist grudgingly admitted, "I found myself feeling faintly
jealous of America's capacity for emotion."

The Ryder Cup Riot provides another example of what most distinguishes the
United States' world-conquering popular culture from Britain's, or even from
Canada's: its exuberant, extroverted, expressive African-American tinge.
Novelist Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man), critic Albert Murray, and their disciple
trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, have argued that rather than merely being a pitiful
victim of racism, the black man's defiantly open style of self-expression,
emotional yet manly, makes him the most distinctively representative of
Americans.

During the '80s and '90s, when African-American-dominated sports like basketball
and football soared in global popularity, with annual salaries reaching as
high as Michael Jordan's $33-million (US), golf languished (relatively speaking).
Through 1996, no golfer had won even a measly $2-million (US) in one year
on the PGA tour. In an era that worships in-your-face trash-talking superstars,
it didn't help that golfers are probably the most introverted of top athletes.
When asked why they got interested in golf as boys, many pros answer, "Because
I could play by myself." And the game requires so much emotional control
that most players don't hit their prime until their mid-30s.

The forces that lead to the Brookline Brouhaha began building on April 13,
1997. Golf's New Golden Age started the day Tiger Woods, watched by a record
number of TV viewers, won the Masters by 12 shots. This instantly validated
golf as a real sport in the public's mind. Although few will openly admit
it, most people now assume that blacks tend to be naturally better athletes
than whites, and thus if your game doesn't have a black as its top star,
it's probably no more of a sport than, say, billiards.

Yet, despite the press and Nike's obsession with portraying Tiger as "black,"
and as the harbinger of a purported coming wave of African-American golf
stars, Tiger would stubbornly remind everybody that he's twice as Asian as
he is African. In fact, the black wave in big-time golf has been receding
since the mid-'80s. There are now more black players on the Senior PGA tour
than on the regular PGA tour. This is because, as the golf cart replaced
the caddy, opportunities for poor boys to earn money on golf courses shrank.
And since most new golf courses are charging $50 to $150 per round, this
isn't likely to change much. Woods, though, does represent what's really
the Next Big Thing: the Asian wave. Three of the top four young female players
are of Asian descent, and there's a 14-year-old Californian named Henry Liaw
who might be better than even Tiger was at that age.

Still, Tiger's African-American cultural heritage is a key to his popularity.
He was the first to inject black macho charisma into a game moulded by Jack
Nicklaus' introverted Teutonic discipline. Although from tee to hole Woods
is as focused and methodical as Nicklaus, once he sinks a putt he unleashes
a series of fist pumps that has galvanized into existence an entirely new
set of fans for the royal and ancient game.

Woods-worship brought the NFL and NBA fan out for the Ryder Cup. In turn,
the other American golfers began playing to the crowd, Woods-style. As the
Americans stormed back from a huge deficit on Sunday, we witnessed the unlikely
sight of the whitest man in sports, David Duval, fist-pumping and egging
the crowd on like he had just had a race transplant and turned into Charles
Barkley.

The downside of golf's new glamour and popularity is that drunken loud-mouths
in the crowd can do far more damage at a golf tournament than they can at
a basketball or football game, where everybody is yelling. But merely banning
beer sales might alleviate much of this problem.

Does this African-Americanization of golf mean Old World golfers are doomed
to obscurity? Well, the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin did fairly
well for themselves by imitating African-Americans, so I'm sure the Europeans
will be able to master their Tiger-style fist-pumps by the 2001 Ryder Cup
in England.